Category: Media

The New York Times’ Latest Anti-Gun News Story

Print journalism is pretty simple, really. At least it used to be. For decades there were basically two types of stories, news and opinion. Reporters wrote news stories. Columnists and a few others wrote opinion pieces.

But in recent years we’ve seen another type of journalism rise in prominence, the anti-gun story, which masquerades as a regular news piece but is chock-full of opinion and false claims. When reporters fill their anti-gun stories with their opinions their editors do nothing, because they often share their staffer’s opinions.

During my 20 years as a newspaperman, I would call out the authors of anti-gun stories whenever I saw them, but my criticisms were usually never addressed, even though we have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Nowadays, journalists talk constantly about the accuracy of their reporting. However, when they write anti-gun stories, the normal journalism standards are gone, and the editing is a complete joke. The size of the newspaper also makes a difference. Smaller newspapers are generally more accurate when writing about guns than the big ones.

Case in point: The New York Times.

On Monday, the Times published what is perhaps the most anti-gun news story seen in quite a while. It was written by reporter Glenn Thrush, who started at the newspaper in 2017 and claimed in his bio that his most “fulfilling assignment” was writing obituaries, which is odd. Writing about the recently departed is far from fulfilling.

Thrush’s story was titled “Trump Administration to Roll Back Array of Gun Control Measures.” The array was described as a reversal of the strict gun control rules Joe Biden ordered “to stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles.”

If you look closely at Thrush’s story, you will find factual errors and anti-gun hyperbole in nearly every paragraph. For example, Thrush wrote that gun dealers stripped of the Federal Firearm Licenses by Biden’s crazy zero-tolerance policy were “found to have repeatedly violated federal laws and regulations.”

This is far from the truth.

Biden’s insane policy stripped hundreds of gun dealers of their FFL’s solely because of extremely minor clerical errors. It is estimated to have increased the FFL revocation rate by 700 percent. Thrush never mentioned that, or that the ATF occasionally sent its poorly trained SWAT team to the gun dealers’ homes, or that the dealers were handcuffed and laying on their stomachs during their conversations with the ATF. In one case, the alleged suspect never got the chance to respond to any of the federal allegations, because ATF’s SWAT team shot and killed him in his own home before they had a chance to talk.

Thrush was not kind to Attorney General Pam Bondi or her plan to use the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to determine whether it is “engaging in a pattern or practice of depriving ordinary, law-abiding Californians of their Second Amendment rights.”

Even though this task is clearly covered by federal law, Thrush claimed that Bondi was “repurposing an investigative unit that had been used to expose racial discrimination and police violence by local enforcement agencies.”

Bondi’s decision didn’t involve any repurposing. The federal laws that govern the Civil Rights Division are very clear, unlike Biden’s ATF rules.

The author spoke to the executive director of Giffords, who falsely claimed Trump gave his seal of approval to “reckless dealers who are willing to sell guns to traffickers and criminals.” Over the years I have met more than a few gun dealers, but no one willing to sell arms to anyone with a criminal record. That this actually made it into a New York Times story is incredibly damning.

Thrush also claimed that the ATF took “an abrupt U-turn” from the schemes of Biden and ATF’s former director to “stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles that have contributed to mass shootings and exacerbated the violent crime wave that peaked after the coronavirus pandemic.”

A flood of unregulated handguns and rifles?

Remember that the next time you fill out an ATF Form 4473.

Media Efforts To Turn Signalgate Into A Scandal Are The Surest Sign It’s Not One

There are still pieces of the “Signalgate” saga of interest — like how did the worst person in Washington end up in the chat? But what would have been a relatively minor controversy has been so excessively hyped up as an epic scandal that it’s impossible to remember why it aroused anyone in the first place.

What we know from screenshots of a Signal smartphone group chat published in The Atlantic on Monday (followed by another round of screenshots on Wednesday) is that a couple of weeks ago, high-level Trump administration officials were in the chat debating the merits of a U.S. attack on the Islamic Houthi militants in Yemen. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who is proven to make things up for the sake of defaming President Trump, said he was included in the chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who has confirmed as much, though he said it was accidental and he doesn’t know how Goldberg was added.

There are legitimate concerns about federal recordkeeping and handling of sensitive communications, but to the extent that the content of the chat is newsworthy, it features an interesting debate on foreign policy between Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others. What’s most consequential is a portion in which Hegseth tells the chat the times that some targets will be bombed on a specific day, without specific locations, names, or routes.

It’s debatable whether the information was classified (the administration says it wasn’t) or could have potentially endangered lives — what good is a time without a location? — but per usual, the media haven’t let enough be enough. Before publishing the full screenshots, Goldberg claimed that in the chat Waltz had identified a covert CIA agent, which wasn’t true; and he suggested that explicitly named in the chat were specific enemy targets, which was also untrue.

Then a Wall Street Journal editorial said the “real security scandal” was that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who is at the center of peace negotiations in Israel and Ukraine, was on the chat while in Russia and therefore, “Russian intelligence services must be listening to Mr. Witkoff’s every eyebrow flutter.” There’s no evidence that Witkoff’s phone was on him while he was in Russia, and the one message from him in the screenshots would have placed him back in the U.S. at the time it was sent. Witkoff has said he only had a secure device while he was in Russia.

Most irksome are subsequent news articles characterizing the chat screenshots as containing “details” and “specifics” on the military attacks, when it’s at best unclear how useful time stamps alone would be in thwarting them. It’s a pointless mind exercise anyway. The public knew nothing about the conversation or the military attack plans until days after they were executed. If that’s to Goldberg’s credit, then congratulations to him — he’s not a complete and total traitor to his country, even if he is anti-American in every other way.

That brings us to the enduring point of concern with this highly oversold story: Why did Mike Waltz have Goldberg’s contact information? What are the odds that this exact anti-Trump media figure would be selected to slip into a sensitive group chat? Waltz has offered doubtful explanations and theories, such as the possibility that Goldberg’s number was listed under the wrong name in his phone contacts or, even more dubious, that Goldberg’s contact was “sucked in” via a third party. Waltz has also said he thought Goldberg was “someone else.” Okay, who? Either Waltz never intended to include the contact belonging to Goldberg — “sucked in” — or he did but thought it was a different person. It can’t be both.

It’s possible Waltz really has no clue what took place there. Stranger things have happened. But his version of events isn’t satisfying. It’s to his benefit that it’s the one part of this whole episode receiving the least amount of attention from the people keeping the story alive.

And they wonder why no one trusts them anymore.

Once upon a time, people trusted the media. When someone was questioned about where they got some fact, just responding, “I heard it on the news,” was enough to silence criticism.

In fact, distrust of the media was something used in fiction to show that an individual was a little unhinged; if not a lot unhinged.

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I’m not saying the media was more trustworthy, mind you, only that they had that trust.

They don’t anymore. More and more people distrust the mainstream media, and the media seems to be at a loss for why. At least, I’d imagine they would be since they don’t seem to be addressing the problem, even as their viewership/readership plummets.

New media outlets tend to get a lot more traffic and have a lot more trust, but the mainstream media can’t understand why. For them, it’s something insidious and not the result of their own failures.

It started ages ago, but it ramped up during Trump’s first term when they decided it was their duty to make sure Trump was a one-term president. They stopped even pretending, and it just got worse.

This week, we had a couple of grand examples of it.

Let’s start with this one.

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Now, that looks pretty clear-cut, doesn’t it? Tulsi Gabbard saying Trump and Putin are tight is kind of unambiguous.

Except, it’s BS. The AP got called on it, and then posted this:

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That’s right. Gabbard wasn’t talking about Putin but Modi. They hoped they could get away with it, but they didn’t.

The story is now gone in that way, but the internet is forever.

But, in fairness, it’s not just the mainstream media that’s the problem. Even their new media allies engage in this, too.

The Daily Beast ran this on Monday:

The story comes from an upcoming book, apparently, which means legacy media at work, with The Daily Beast ginning up interest in it.

Now, we know that Trump has played fast and loose with marriage vows in the past, so this certainly sounds plausible. Except, it didn’t happen.

Well, it did, but not like they’re spinning it.

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 The Great Unraveling.

For the last few weeks we have been watching one of the greatest collections of weaponized autistics in the world going happily about their task of unraveling exactly how much of our money was directed through previously undetected means for previously undetected and wholly curious ends. The Doge crew are going at it with the zeal and joy of unleashed rat terriers turned loose on a field of suitable prey, in tracking millions of dollars’ worth of our money into various progressive slush funds.

And interesting things are suddenly happening. Although coincidence is not causality, by any means … still, there are things that people on the conservativish side of things have wondered about for the last decade. Things like … strangely well-choreographed protests, with tens and hundreds of participants (who mostly have no obvious means of support) appearing almost like magic, carrying professionally-printed signs. Hmmm … we all wondered in times past: who is footing the bill for all this?

It may very well turn out that we all were – just as it has turned out that USAID grants went out to support practically every cause beloved by progressives nationally and world-wide. To non-governmental organizations playing hopscotch with international migrants. To champion the causes of LGBTWXYZLOL-whatever, around the world in our own back yard and in our elementary schools. To progressive media voices, like the BBC. What the ever-loving H-E-double hockey sticks? Don’t those smooth-talking euro-snob Jew-haters get enough moola from their own government, they have to vacuum up from us as well, like a coke addict snorting a line as long as the US-Canada border?

And while I’m on the topic of our very own dear media, what about the ongoing slaughter of careers and the driving rain of pink slips falling at CBS and NBC? Joy Reid, Lester Holt and other expensive performers are being pried out of their comfortable sinecures. Personalities whom I have never particularly followed and only hear about when they have been spectacularly stupid on camera and the conservative blogosphere takes notice. I imagine their superiors pried them loose, like a dentist with an impacted molar – but why now?

Is it because top management at the various media enterprises have suddenly realized with the election of Trump that a large chunk of the public ignores them – and they have not anything like the power that they thought they had? Have they figured out that advertising on their programs was money wasted, and business sponsors know it? This is a new world for our national establishment media organs, where CBS Sixty Minutes counts for naught, and a podcaster like Joe Rogan may have put Trump and Vance over the top with an important segment of the voting public through doing searching, free-form long-format interviews.

Or could it be that laundered government funds were holding up our own media, at least as much as paid advertising? Now that such funds are being short-stopped – is that another reason for the collapsing of our media’s house of cards, now that the gravy train has come to a halt?

The AP’s feelings get hurt; it’s a First Amendment crisis!

The Associated Press (AP) makes its money selling stories to other media outlets. It pays “stringers”—reporters and photographers—around the world to submit stories, which it makes available to its subscriber outlets who can’t afford to send reporters and photographers around the globe.

That’s a good thing for smaller media outlets like local new stations, but it’s also a very bad thing because then the AP makes mistakes, or goes woke, so do its subscribers who have no way of knowing they’re making those mistakes. They do know they’re going woke, but even if they’d rather not, their choice is to play along or drop the AP feed. A good example of the AP’s wokeness and anti-Americanism is this:

Shira Bibas’ sons “died in captivity.” An honest and accurate account would say Bibas and her boys, 4 and 10 months, were savagely strangled by Hamas terrorists, and their bodies were clumsily mutilated so Hamas could claim they died in an Israeli airstrike, a perversely stupid and easily exposed lie.

The AP also uses its style guide to enforce wokeness and media outlets, including the majors, happily go along. It’s an enviable perch atop the media hierarchy and the AP has become used to certain perks, among them, a prominent chair in the White House Press Room.

Until, that is, the AP decided to keep calling the Gulf of America the Gulf of Mexico, and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, surely with the permission of President Trump, banished them, also from Air Force One and other places and events. This is also surely a part of Leavitt’s reshuffling the Press Room deck, booting established outlets replacing them with new media.to give new media a chance.

The horror.

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Europeans Don’t Get Free Speech, and Neither Does CBS News, Apparently.
The network had a true banner weekend.

JD Vance spoke over the weekend at the Munich security conference on behalf of the United States — the primary topic was Ukraine, for obvious reasons — but instead of discussing the immediate geopolitical matter, he took his time at the rostrum to deliver a harsh message to the European grandees gathered there about the enemy “within.” And he wasn’t subtle in identifying that threat as the overreaction of Europeans to dissident populist parties:

The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy.

But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. . . .

Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the Cold War positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that canceled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.

You may be outraged or shocked to see Vance speaking so bluntly to our European allies, but I, for one, am not. I wrote about the canceled Romanian elections last December with shocked disbelief at the casual annulment of democracy on the flimsiest of pretexts — and in truth, merely for going unexpectedly wrong for the establishment party in power — by people who constantly scream about “democracy.” Near as I can tell, NR was one of just five serious outlets in all of American political media to even bother with a commentary about what was otherwise a completely ignored and blandly reported travesty of democracy. (“Nothing to see here, move along.” And always, the paper-thin excuse: “Why are you complaining? You don’t want the Russians to win, do you?” No, but I don’t like being transparently condescended to, either.)

My only disagreement with Vance is that I suspect he is either making an intellectual category error or — more disingenuously but intelligently — arguing like a Straussian, subtly undermining his nominal point to demonstrate the hypocrisy of everyone he’s speaking to in the audience.

Let me explain rather simply: The Europeans do not believe in “free speech” in the same way Americans do, and never really have. Anyone who has spent even a moment’s worth of study on the differences between Continental, British, and American speech laws — and how they have historically evolved — knows that Europe as a whole knows no legally defined conception of true freedom of speech and that England once had it but, without a written constitution to turn tradition into fundamental law, has seen it eroded in recent decades.

Only in the United States, with its First Amendment, are such principles codified — and foregrounded — in a way that has not only shaped our culture from its earliest days but preserved that untamable expressive freedom that is most essentially American within us. (I say for the better; Nina Jankowicz would argue for the worse.)

Vance’s entire speech is 20 minutes long and worth reading in full — he is the Trump administration’s most effective advocate by far — but allow me one further excerpt from what must have landed in the room like a rhetorical punch in the face. (You rarely see this sort of schoolmasterly rhetoric deployed by United States diplomacy to properly scold Europe — it is usually instead deployed by Europeans to lecture us.)

I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges.

But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making.

If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.

No wonder the Germans were weeping by the end of it all. Vance had called everybody in the audience on their bluff. “You’re not afraid of your own people, are you?” Of course they are. (And also, let’s not kid ourselves, either: They have their reasons, especially if they’re Germans.)

You know who also is terrified of the people? CBS News. Yes, CBS had a true banner Sunday for itself this weekend by tagging along with Vance to Munich. And they made it clear they were on the side of the Europeans weeping about having to listen to the angry voices of their constituents.

Margaret Brennan made headlines pontificating about the origins of the Holocaust from too much “free speech” — a topic for tomorrow’s Carnival of Fools because few in the media have more willingly donned clown makeup in recent weeks — but really it was 60 Minutes’ remarkable praise of Germany’s anti-free-speech laws that took the cake for me.

Now, 60 Minutes has had a pretty rough go of it lately, to be fair. I don’t think Donald Trump has a leg to stand on in his lawsuit against them (for editing a Kamala Harris interview), and I refuse to dignify the matter with serious comment — everything I said about that was already said when I discussed his equally repulsive “revenge lawsuit” against Ann Selzer.

But watching 60 Minutes’ hosts nod sympathetically along with German state prosecutors and investigators as they calmly explained that every random racist internet insult in their country was a prosecutable crime was both mildly horrifying — they presented this to America as a preferable alternative — and perfectly explanatory as to their current position at the bottom-most tier of American public respect: They fear us and think we, as citizens, deserve to be informationally “managed.” Why shouldn’t we hold them in equal contempt? They’re as post-democratic in their impulses as Elon Musk, the man they hate, who happily avers they should be sent to prison. Musk, whatever his other qualities, is clearly a megalomaniac with zero respect for anything except the gratification of his own impulses. CBS theoretically aspires to something more.

Op-Ed Reveals Just How Little Most Gun Control Advocates Understand Guns

The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson rattled more than a few cages. There are reports of CEOs traveling with armed security, though I haven’t seen corroboration of those, and we’ve seen just how many people are OK with murdering someone simply because they don’t like them.

And in the media, it’s been a great time to push all the evils of so-called “ghost guns” since it turns out the alleged killer had one in his possession.

The problem is that a great many of those in the media who are beating the drum really don’t know what they’re talking about.

Just in time for Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and the winter solstice and New Year’s, Republicans and Democrats find themselves face-to-face with a problem they can actually solve together.

They can outlaw so-called “ghost guns” like the one used to kill a health care executive recently in New York City.

Imagine that. A genuine end-of-the-year opportunity to do something for the common good — something that transcends cultures and religions and politics.

Yes, dear reader, I know what you are thinking: Our nation’s political system is so broken that Republicans and Democrats barely speak to each other. So actually solving a problem — well, that may take a miracle.

But this is a season of hope, right?

Ghost guns are virtually untraceable. They can be made at home, from plastic-like materials on a 3D printer. They look like toys. And prospective shooters can even pick a favorite color, with choices ranging from tennis ball green to Barbie pink.

But these guns are definitely not toys. And we all know what ghost guns can do. We saw one in action on the morning of Dec. 4, when a hooded, masked man stepped from the predawn shadows on a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan and killed a health care executive with a shot in the back.

First, let’s talk about gun tracing, since that seems to be the main condemnation of these homemade firearms.

There’s no evidence that gun tracing has ever been used to solve a crime. People have specifically looked, and while there might be an exception they missed, it’s clearly not an essential tool for law enforcement, especially since there’s no way it would be enough to secure a conviction in and of itself.

Second, let’s get into the “they look like toys” argument, which is a new one for me. I guess I should be thankful for that because a new argument means that I get to take a different, novel approach in response. I generally like that.

However, this one is too idiotic to actually enjoy rebutting.

They look like toys? Where the hell is he looking at homemade guns? Yeah, they’re plastic–polymer, actually, but who am I to quibble?–but the gun that the alleged killer had on hand was one that basically looked like a Glock, the most popular handgun model in the country. Toys generally are made to look like real guns anyway, so that’s a nonsense argument even if it were true.

The reason there’s no outrage over “ghost guns” is that the people who are outraged over the murder are the people who support gun rights, as a general thing. That’s it. That’s why there’s “no outrage” over Thompson’s murder. The people who want to be outraged over guns are too busy celebrating a murder, which just goes to show it’s not about the guns, it’s about people like you and me having them.

Saudi Suspect Plows Car Into German Christmas Market; U.S. Media Blames [Checks Notes] the Car

An attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, has left at least two people dead and 60-80 injured. According to Die Welt:

A driver drove into a group of people at the Christmas market in Magdeburg. Government spokesman Matthias Schuppe confirmed to WELT that it was an attack. City spokesman Michael Reif also said that the initial report was an “attack on the Christmas market”. The suspected perpetrator is in police custody. WELT learned from security sources that he is a man from Saudi Arabia who was born in 1974.

The Saudi national, who had reportedly been in Germany illegally since 2006, allegedly rented a car and headed to the market two hours west of Berlin, which was teeming with visitors enjoying the Christmas festivities. A suitcase was found on the passenger seat of the vehicle, according to Die Welt, and authorities are currently trying to ascertain whether it contains an explosive device. The terrorist was taken into custody, and it’s not known whether he acted alone.

A police spokesman said the suspect drove “at least 400 meters across the Christmas market.” A witness said the attack occurred in the market’s fairy tale section.

Police have secured the area and are asking people to avoid the city center.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X, “My thoughts are with the victims and their families. We stand by their side and by the side of the people of Magdeburg. My thanks go to the dedicated rescue workers in these anxious hours.”

Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser recently called for vigilance at Christmas markets. “Federal security authorities do not currently have any concrete indications of danger,” she told reporters. “But in view of the high threat situation at an abstract level we still have reason to be very vigilant and to take effective action for our security.”

Deutsche Welle reported in November on Germany’s new knife ban:

the German government passed new security legislation in October in response to a deadly knife attack in the western city of Solingen in August. The suspected Islamist attacker killed three people and injured eight more.

The new security package tightened rules on the carrying of weapons in public spaces in Germany and explicitly banned the carrying of knives at festivals, sporting events, markets, fairs and other large events.

“The police will be present in many locations to ensure security,” said Faeser.

The attack in Magdeburg comes eight years, almost to the day after Muslim extremist Anis Amri hijacked a truck and plowed into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and wounding 56 others. According to the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, Amri was in Germany illegally and was well known to authorities both for his radicalism and his crime sprees:

When Amri entered the European Union on April 4, 2011, via the Italian island of Lampedusa, he claimed to be 16 years old. After his arrival, he was placed in a refugee shelter for minors in Belpasso, Sicily. The Italian authorities asked Tunisia for travel documents in order to return Amri to his home country, but the request went unanswered. In October 2011, Amri and four other Tunisian refugees attacked a staff member at the shelter and started a fire. Amri was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. It was during his incarceration in different Italian jails that Amri became radicalized. A report for the Italian Committee for Strategic Anti-Terrorism Analysis (CASA) stated that Amri was considered a “dangerous person” and a “leader of the Islamists in prison” and that he was “transferred due to severe security concerns.” Amri had threatened and attacked staff and reportedly threatened to decapitate a Christian inmate.

On June 17, 2015, Italy was legally required to release Amri from a deportation facility because Tunisian authorities had not responded to its request to send travel documents for him.  After his release, Amri traveled to Switzerland, where he stayed for around two weeks before traveling to Germany. In early July 2015, German police in the city of Freiburg, near the Swiss border, registered Amri for “unlawful entry” under the name Anis Amir and took his fingerprints and photo. [Emphasis added]

U.S. media outlets were quick to blame the car for today’s attack:

The Clock Strikes Thirteen
And the Establishment gets washed away by a preference cascade. But it was a damn close-run thing.

What happened? It’s like a spell broke. Since November’s election (re-election?) of President Donald Trump, the woke is going away, and all sorts of problems are resolving themselves. But why?

There are several reasons, but basically, it’s a preference cascade.

In law we talk about the proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock, which is not only wrong in itself, but which calls into question everything that has come before. Most of our institutions have been chiming thirteen for quite a while, and people have noticed.

But it’s not enough to notice. Soviet citizens knew their system was founded on lies, too, but the system kept them isolated, unaware that so many of their fellow citizens felt the same way, and unable to come together to act.

This technique, used by totalitarians of all sorts, is called “preference falsification,” in which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true. If the powers that be are good at it, virtually every citizen can hate them and want them out, but no one will do anything because every citizen who feels that way thinks they’re the only one, or one of a tiny number.

In his classic book, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, economist Timur Kuran notes how governments, and social movements, do their best to enforce this sort of ideological uniformity. People tend to hide unpopular views to avoid ostracism or punishment; they stop hiding them when they feel safe.

This can produce rapid change: In totalitarian societies like the old Soviet Union, the police and propaganda organizations do their best to enforce preference falsification. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. This works until something breaks the spell and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers — or even to the citizens themselves. Kuran calls this sudden change a “preference cascade,” and I believe that’s what’s happening here.

In America, the left spent years bullying people into accepting “woke” ideas on race, gender, and politics. There’s considerable reason to believe that a majority of Americans never accepted these ideas, but between constant media repetition, and the risk of being mobbed and canceled if you disagreed with them, most people for years were afraid to stand up.

But two things put a stop to that. One was Donald Trump’s election. The other – and the two are related – was Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now X, which is now a free-speech platform with roughly equal representation of Democrats and Republicans. Both had the effect of blowing up the lefty bubble and letting people realize that they, not the woke, were the actual majority.

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Smith & Wesson Gets Booted Off Facebook

One of the oldest firearms manufacturers in the United States, with generations of history supplying legal firearms worldwide to law enforcement, police and other government organizations, not to mention millions of civilian customers, has had their Facebook account shut down.

Getting the boot

According to a post that Smith & Wesson made on The Social Media Platform Formerly Known As Twitter (“X,” as Elon Musk wants us to call it now), the historic manufacturer saw their Facebook account canceled in late November, 2024. Here’s their announcement, verbatim:

Despite our extensive efforts and resources spent on trying to adhere to Facebook’s ever-changing community guidelines on firearms, our account was suspended indefinitely on Friday, November 22nd, 15 years after its original creation.

In an era where free speech and the right to bear arms are under constant attack, we want to thank @elonmusk and @X for supporting free speech and our constitutional rights guaranteed by the 1st and 2nd Amendments.

While we work to reinstate our account, we encourage our 1.6 million Facebook followers and fans to seek out platforms that represent these shared values.

https://twitter.com/Smith_WessonInc/status/1861856272657822178

 

They posted the following image of their ban announcement as well:

And for his part, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk replied to Smith & Wesson’s post by saying “We restored the gun emoji and believe in the Constitution 🔫🔫.”

An ongoing trend

While some readers might be surprised by this news, they shouldn’t be. Meta-owned Facebook is just one of many online platforms that continue to enact restrictions on legal firearm owners—I myself have received warnings for posting photos from a hunting stand. YouTube creators have seen their channels targeted by anti-firearm restrictions in recent months. In an era of political and social instability, Big Tech appears to be doubling down on its slow march to ban public displays of firearms, instead of walking back policies that discriminate against gun owners.

Why There Can’t Be Two Sets of Rules on Guns

Even in some of the most anti-gun states, there are groups that get exceptions to many restrictions. Police officers are often exempt from many gun control laws. They can buy stuff that you and I might not be able to, simply because of their status as law enforcement officers. They also get to keep those guns after they leave the profession in most cases.

And while police officers do an important job and many are outstanding in what they do, there shouldn’t be a different set of rules for them.

Understand that I’m not anti-cop. My father retired as a local police officer, then went back into uniform to serve as the chief of police in a small town nearby. I grew up around law enforcement and so I know something that a lot of people on both sides might not want to hear. Cops are people.

Because they’re people, there are good and bad individuals who wear a badge.
This comes up because of this case out of Connecticut.

NEW LONDON, CT — A judge has ordered a police officer accused of assaulting his girlfriend to stay away from the woman and surrender any weapons he has, according to The Day of New London.

Julio Gil-Martinez, 29, of New London, was arrested Saturday on a warrant and charged with first-degree unlawful restraint, second-degree strangulation, second-degree threatening, third-degree assault, and interfering with an emergency call, New London police said in a news release.

The arrest came after a victim went to the Waterford Police Department to report the incident, which was determined to have happened at a home in New London, according to police.

Gil-Martinez is currently on administrative leave, but this sort of makes the point about police officers.

They should be the best among us, but the truth is that they’re not. Some of the best among us become law enforcement officers but that same profession is attractive to all kinds of people who probably shouldn’t wear a uniform of any kind beyond a prison jumpsuit.

Now, I’m not saying Gil-Martinez is guilty. That’s for a court to decide and if he is, he deserves to rot in a cell for a good long time. He’s really not the point here, though.

The point is that police officers aren’t a special class that’s above reproach. They’re people.

So why do so many gun control laws exempt them, particularly with regard to what they do while off the job?

I get that they may face certain threats because of their job that many others never will–they do make enemies, after all–but some of us make enemies just fine without a badge. I mean, I write political commentary. Do you think I haven’t been threatened? Sure. Does that mean political commentators should get an exemption as well?

The answer from your average anti-gunner would likely be that no, we shouldn’t.

So then why do the police? Don’t get me wrong, I have no issue with cops having guns. I have no problem with them having all the guns. I just don’t like the double standard.

Here’s a thought: If police need special privileges in order to protect themselves from their enemies, then why not just lift the restrictions so that police offers stop getting special treatment and others can then defend themselves?

Unfortunately, for anti-gunners, that’s not acceptable.

See, the issue isn’t guns. It’s just guns in the hands of people who aren’t drawing a government paycheck.

Trump’s pick for FCC chairman…..

Only 34% Say Country on Right Track; 56% Can’t Trust News

Only 34 percent of likely voters believe the United States is headed in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen survey, and 56 percent say they don’t find the media delivers accurate news.

Rasmussen keeps weekly track of how voters feel regarding the direction of the country. This week’s report is up one point from last week, but it is up by three points from a year ago, when 31 percent of poll respondents thought the country was on the right track. Sixty-one percent of likely voters polled recently said the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

A separate survey revealed only 16 percent of respondents think it is easier to find news they can trust, and 25 percent think media accuracy is “about the same.”

But beyond those numbers, things get interesting socially and politically.

According to Rasmussen, 30 percent said Fox News “is the cable TV news channel they are most likely to trust.” Coming in second place at 23 percent is CNN, while MSNBC and Newsmax are tied at 15 percent.

“Among those who say they trust cable news for political news, most name either Fox News (38%) or CNN (29%) as the most trusted channel,” Rasmussen said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, among Democrats, 40 percent say CNN is their most trusted news source, followed by MSNBC at 26 percent and Vox News at 16 percent. On the flip side, 46 percent of Republicans prefer Fox News, followed by Newsmax at 26 percent and CNN at a pitiful 11 percent.

An impressive 68 percent of Democrats say their most trusted source for political news is either network television or major cable news channels, Rasmussen discovered. Among Republicans, network trust shrinks to 51 percent and among Independents, only 39 percent depend upon networks or cable news channels.

Among Independent voters, 45 percent trust independent online news sources for political news, along with 34 percent of Republicans and 22 percent of Democrats, according to Rasmussen.

Interestingly, more men (33%) than women (26%) say they trust Fox News most, while more women (17%) than men (12%) “prefer MSNBC.”